Editing California Penal Code (section)

==History==
The Penal Code enacted by the [[California State Legislature]] in February 1872 was derived from a penal code proposed by the [[Government of New York (state)|New York code commission]] in 1865 which is frequently called the Field Penal Code after the most prominent of the code commissioners, [[David Dudley Field II]] (who did draft the commission's other proposed codes).<ref name="Kadish">{{cite journal |last1=Kadish |first1=Sanford H. |author-link1=Sanford Kadish |title=The Model Penal Code's Historical Antecedents |journal=Rutgers Law Journal |date=1987 |volume=19 |pages=521–538 |url=https://lawcat.berkeley.edu/record/1112984/files/fulltext.pdf}}</ref>  The actual drafter of the New York penal code was commissioner [[William Curtis Noyes]], a former prosecutor.<ref name="Kadish" /> New York belatedly enacted the Field Penal Code in 1881.

Prior to the promulgation of the [[Model Penal Code]] in 1962, the Field Penal Code was by far the most broadly influential attempt at codification of criminal law, but was severely flawed in that it actually ''continued'' many muddled common law concepts (like [[malice aforethought]]) when the point of [[Codification (law)|codification]] was to clean up the common law.<ref name="Kadish" />  About this, [[University of California, Berkeley|UC Berkeley]] law professor [[Sanford H. Kadish]] wrote in 1987: "None of the codes I have considered had a larger measure of influence. None deserved it less."<ref name="Kadish" />  Before the enactment of the Penal Code, California relied on [[common law]] definitions of crimes as well as the accumulated [[case law]] that went back to the British common law of post-colonial times.